Chemtrails over the Country Club: What the critics are saying about Lana Del Rey’s new album

Lana Del Rey has released her seventh album, Chemtrails over the Country Club, and the reviews are flooding in.

The majority of critics seem to have reacted positively to the musician’s latest work – the follow-up to last year’s Norman F***ing Rockwell! – which comes after a year of controversies surrounding Del Rey’s comments on social media, including the claim that she was “changing the world” with her music.

The Independent gave Chemtrails five stars, with albums critic Helen Brown hailing it as “damn-near impossible to resist”.

“A great storyteller, Del Rey consistently delivers the who, what, where and when,” the review said. “She picks out the telling details – turquoise jewellery, the TV in the corner, ‘on the second floor, baby’. She sketches a backstory (‘I come from a small town’) and then tells you how it all feels.”

The Times awarded the album four stars and praised Del Rey’s “plaintive songwriting”, while NME gave it five stars and commented: “Lana Del Rey is at the peak of her game – just don’t expect her to come down anytime soon.”

In a four-star review, critic Kate Solomon wrote for the i Paper: “[Del Rey] has always been one for a lyric that sounds as if it has been ripped from my rough note book circa 2002 (‘I love you lots like polka dots’ in ‘Wild at Heart’), but here they are couched in gorgeous harmonies and beguiling musical through-lines dissipating like vapour as soon as you register them.”

In a more mixed three-star review, The Guardian’s Alexis Petredis commented: “Chemtrails Over the Country Club does what it does exceptionally well. The songwriting misfires that plagued her early albums have been eradicated through that refinement; everything here is incredibly melodically strong, strong enough, in fact, that it feels beguiling rather than formulaic, which is an impressive feat to pull off.

“It literally isn’t going to change the world, no matter what its creator thinks. But almost uniquely among her peers, she’s created a world of her own, which is deserving of respect. How long she can keep inhabiting it before that world feels confined is another question.”

Pitchfork gave the album a score of 7.5, in a review that said of her song “Wild at Heart”: “For those who found solace in Norman F***ing Rockwell’s sincerity – that quality that made her less of a fabulist and more of a protagonist – ‘ Wild at Heart’ represents the Lana myth at its most hard-boiled. The song begins on Sunset Boulevard. The melody is as if ‘How to Disappear” and ‘Love Song’ – two of NFR’s most plaintive ballads—were put into a blender. The references are Lynchian, but only at a slant: There is nothing of Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage’s skull-crushing vim from the auteur’s movie by the same name, but the soapy storyline does smack of the film’s strangely glib tenderness..”

It concluded: “There is a lot of cigarette smoking, peripatetic wandering, and firm declarations of being seductively f***ed-up. ‘If you love me, you love me,’ she assures, ‘because I’m wild at heart.’ Welcome back to Lanaland.”